


The Old '61

by DaftPunk_DeLorean



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: AND THEY FINALLY GET THAT HAPPINESS, Bucky/Steve - Freeform, Fluff, M/M, Stucky - Freeform, by way of a tiny bit of angst, kind of an AU, our boys deserve happiness, steve/bucky - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 07:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7968322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaftPunk_DeLorean/pseuds/DaftPunk_DeLorean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Steve and Bucky learn to live a new life, in a new world, and finally find the happiness they've always wanted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old '61

“You’re gonna fall through that door,” Bucky said. Steve smiled at the book in his lap, slowly turning a page just to feel the texture of the paper, not really reading what was on the page.

“It’s locked,” he said, leaning more comfortably against the passenger side door of their derelict old pickup truck. He pushed his toes under Bucky’s warm thigh, letting his head fall sideways to rest on the back of the wide bench seat.

“That’s not what I meant,” Bucky said with a sigh and an amused sideways glance. Steve looked up at Bucky’s young, untroubled face, his smile warming. The rising sun was just cresting over the horizon, as sweet as biting into a ripe peach, and seemed to glow through Bucky, everything about him translucent and delicate. 

Steve shifted, laying the book on the front dash and sliding up close beside Bucky, so that his thighs straddled the gearshift. Bucky wrapped a strong arm around Steve’s broad shoulders, pulling him tight against his side. 

The desert heat pressed insistently against the faded enamel of their truck, blowing hot into the lowered window and through their hair, even in the velvety grey and timid orange of early morning. Steve closed his eyes and focused on the way the heat seemed alive, how it was sultry and oppressive and felt like a pile of rocks on his chest, pressing into his mouth like fingers and filling his lungs with water. How it made him feel suffocated and vital and alive. 

“You think about home much anymore?” Steve murmured, eyes still closed as he tried to make the fuzzy memory as real as possible.

“Sometimes. It comes and goes, ya know?” Bucky said thoughtfully. “Seems so long ago, but it feels like we just left last night.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Steve sighed comfortably, not brushing away the few locks of Bucky’s long, chestnut hair that tickled his cheek. “This heat makes me nostalgic.” Bucky snorted at that, but didn’t say anything.

Steve often thought about home during the long hours they spent listening to scratchy AM stations between ghost towns. The tinny strains of smoky blues and earthy country kept the surreal night away when the world narrowed down into a double yellow line that snaked into the blackness, just beyond the reach of the yellowed headlights. 

Home was here, now. It was the tattered bench seat of a ’61 Ford F-100, the paint job wavering somewhere between robin’s egg and rust. Home was the empty road, the atmospheric, liminal spaces of transient desert rest stops with their faded picnic tables and rusted swing sets creaking in the breeze. Home was the warmth of Bucky’s hand in his, their endless drive, and slow lovemaking at sleepy, forgotten roadside motels. 

But home used to be something different for them. Home used to be a sweltering, dusty, fourth-floor, two-room Brooklyn walk-up with a fire escape window that Bucky used to sit in wearing nothing but trousers and a sheen of sweat on his chest, smoking a hand-rolled cig and hollerin’ at the dames on the sidewalk across the way. Home had a single burner and a shared toilet down the hall and running water most of the time, but there was always a crooked grin and a soft, secretive kiss and a “hiya, pal” waiting for him there, and Steve felt like a king.

Life was different then. But not simpler. People were always like that, goin’ on about the good ol’ days like they were something special, like the shit in magazines was real. Back then it was soup lines and anger and ration stamps and Victory propaganda and pretending to be roommates, hiding behind closed doors so they didn’t get beaten to death in an alley if anyone found out they were more than roommates. 

And when Bucky got drafted, Steve hugged him one last time at that ridiculous science fair of Stark’s, where Bucky insisted on spending his last night stateside. Then Steve immediately walked back into the recruitment tent and became Erskine’s pet experiment. He wanted to fight, to help the war effort, but deeper inside, he secretly imagined that if he could just get to Bucky’s side, then maybe they could be together again. And if everything went south, then at least they could they could die together. 

He remembered laying with Bucky on the frozen ground somewhere outside of Bavaria, huddled together for warmth, staring up at stars and luxuriating in the rare chance to curl together again. It was a gift that the cold night had afforded them that they couldn’t risk in the daytime.

“You ever think about what you’re gonna do after the war, Buck?” Steve whispered. 

“Yeah. I’m gonna eat a steak the size of my head and we’re gonna get an apartment with its own john. What about you, Stevie boy?” Bucky murmured, and Steve could feel the smile in his voice. 

“I don’t know… all I cared about was getting over here to be with you, I never thought much about what I’d do when it was all over…” 

“You could use your GI bill to go back to art school you know.” 

“I guess… Sometimes it just feels like this is all there’s gonna be, you know? Like the war won’t ever end.” 

Bucky was quiet, but after a moment he nodded and shuffled closer, pressing his forehead against Steve’s. Then in the most ephemeral moment of both terror and elation, Bucky pressed his lips to Steve’s in a chaste, fleeting kiss. 

Steve remembered how warm Bucky’s breath had been against his cheek, how they’d taken off their woolen, Red Cross Victory mittens so they could lace their fingers together, the way the inches between them felt like miles and he’d give almost anything to be back in their shitty little apartment just so they could pull the curtains and hold each other without fear. He craved their sweltering home, but even then, he couldn’t be cold when they were out there together.

Steve blinked his eyes open to the present, the rising sun more golden and honeyed as the moments passed. The few clouds in the east sparkled brilliant silver around the edges, only rivaled by the glint of a sleek silver car that passed them, as though they didn’t exist. Steve idly watched the blue glow of the passenger playing a game on their smart phone, and within minutes the car disappeared liquidly into the horizon, leaving them forgotten and unseen on the empty highway.

“People live too fast now,” Steve mused, startling a laugh out of Bucky. 

“For someone stuck in their twenties, you’re such an old geezer,” he teased. Steve poked him in the ribs and Bucky swerved slightly, making the elderly truck cough at the sudden exertion.

“You were bitchin’ just the other day about how payphones aren’t a thing anymore,” Steve muttered, adding something about pots and kettles under his breath.

“What if I wanted to make a call somewhere between the Petrified Forest and the dinosaur park?” Bucky asked. “What if the truck breaks down?” Steve rolled his eyes.

“Oh, gimme a fuckin’ break. Who would you call? Everyone we ever knew is dead by now. And this truck ain’t going nowhere. It’s a part of us now.”

Bucky just smirked, but Steve knew he was right. The truck was like the rose petal that Steve kept in his pocket. It was eternal. It existed just for them, twenty years before it had even been made. They filled that truck with gas exactly once, when they bought it off an old man who already had a foot in the grave, half-existing in the in-between without even knowing it. It had held steady at three-quarters of a tank for decades.

Steve propped his bare feet on the dash, shifting sideways to lean more against Bucky. He’d had enough practice that his feet wouldn’t fall through the dash, just like he wouldn’t fall through the door when he leaned on it. 

“We drove by that cemetery a few days back,” Steve asked distantly. “It reminded me of our funerals. You ever think much about it anymore?” Bucky turned his head just enough to keep his eyes on the road and still kiss Steve’s blond hair.

“I always thought it was sweet that they buried us beside each other,” Bucky said. “I think Ma knew we weren’t just best friends.” Bucky was thoughtful a moment. “That was the first time you could go solid. With the rose. Remember?”

Steve nodded, that particular memory bright and clear. They had kept their distance from the mourners, holding hands tightly. They were perfectly visible to each other, but nothing more than a trick of the light to the people gathered in black. Steve didn’t have any family; his Pa had died in WWI right after he was born, and his Ma died of tuberculosis when Steve was a teen. Bucky’s family had always been like his own, and they mourned him as much as they mourned Bucky. 

“God, this is so fucking morbid,” Steve had said, fascinated.

“Wanna get close enough to hear what they’re saying? I bet they’re talking all about how you would fight guys twice your size if they looked at a dame wrong,” Bucky teased. Steve elbowed him.

“I bet they’re talking about how you ended up drinking all alone before you were shipped out and showed up to the bus stop half-hungover and half-still drunk, and the CO just about made you jog behind the bus until you sobered up,” Steve teased right back.

The day was sunny and warm, and after the people cleared, Steve and Bucky ventured to their white military headstones, engraved with their rank and division, decorated with white roses and red and blue bunting. They didn’t leave a single footprint on the freshly-turned soil. 

Bucky stretched his arm out in front of him, turning it over and looking at the unmarred skin, and Steve reached out to lace their fingers together. After the bombing, even the serum wasn’t enough to save Steve. And the only thing left of Bucky to send home for his Mama to bury was his left arm. But now Bucky was whole again. 

They knelt down to look at their names on the headstones, and Steve reached a tentative finger to the edge of a rose. He tried to touch it, but his hand passed through it like fog. He tried again, and another two times, before he finally made contact, feeling the silky texture of the ivory petal. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, and the petal detached from the rest of the blossom. Steve held it up to his nose and sniffed, barely picking up on the scent. He was still working on that.

He stood and pocketed the petal, pulling it into that in-between where they existed now. He didn’t know at the moment, but decades would pass, and every time he pulled out that petal to look at, it would be just as supple and silky and sweet-smelling as it was at that very moment. 

Steve turned to Bucky and pulled him close, wrapping his arms around him and brushing their lips together, completely without fear or shame for the first time. 

“Now what do we do, Sergeant?” Steve breathed against Bucky’s lips, and Bucky smiled, slipping his hands under the hem of Steve’s shirt to press warmly against his lower back.

“Anything we want, Captain,” he whispered. They kissed under the dappled shade of the willow that curtained their graves, and walked away hand in hand. They never did go back to visit. 

Not too many months after that, the Axis forces in the eastern theatre surrendered to the Allied Powers, and the second World War was over.

It didn’t take long for them to learn how to be happy in their new life. There were others like them, but they preferred each other’s company. They drove the forgotten highways and buried their toes in the sand on every inch of coast they could find, drifting in and out of reality as easily as breathing. They celebrated the triumphs and mourned the tragedies of humanity, even if they were detached from it. One day the courts decided their love wasn’t a crime, and Bucky made love to Steve as slow and intense as molten steel and they laughed against each other’s lips in quiet happiness the whole time. 

Afterward, when they lay in a pile of warm blankets in the bed of their truck, curled in each other’s arms under the stars just like that icy night somewhere outside of Bavaria, they whispered “I marry you” three times to each other.

“I guess it’s real now,” Steve said softly, and Bucky laughed against the curve of his shoulder.

“It’s always been real, punk,” he whispered, pulling Steve in again. 

Another sleek car streaked past them on the highway, and maybe they were starting to fade into the molten gold of the cresting sun a little, but that was okay. It was like that sometimes. Steve closed his eyes against the light, even though by now, he was the light.

“Where to next?” Bucky asked softly. Steve smiled, pillowing his cheek against Bucky’s shoulder.

“Anywhere. I hear there’s a giant ball of twine somewhere around here,” Steve suggested, lifting a hand and idly turning his fingers over, opening his eyes just enough to watch the brightening rays of sun shine through his skin. Bucky laughed quietly.

“Sure, Stevie. Sounds like a dream.”

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, the lovely old '61, a fitting home for an eternal road trip. :) Also, just in case you've read any of my other works and caught it, I did lift a paragraph from another story of mine because I thought it fit better here. Thanks for reading, darlings!


End file.
